AAAarrrgh ! Human pop-ups !

For the last week or so I have had to contend with the real-life equivelant of pop-up windows. It's like Agent Smith finding a way aboard the Nebakanezer when we all thought he was just an AI construct.

There have been two new free newspapers released in the last week and both of them are trying for the same market (free, evening news). Their methods seem to be to attempt to promote the newspaper by having lots of people handing out the newspapers from 5:00pm onwards around the major tube stations.

Near my tube station, one enterprising lad realised that nearly half of the commuters came around the same corner on their way to the station so he moved his operation to just before that corner so that he would have first pick and therefore hand out more newspapers. (I guess that when their support van runs out of papers, they go home but this strategy would look good for him because he would be going back for a top-up more often than the others.) The others soon cottoned on and now they have people stationed on every corner within 100 metres of the station; it's impossible to avoid them.

The worst part about it all is that they don't care about what they are doing. They don't notice that you have already walked past three people trying to offer you a paper and you have turned each one of them down. The don't even notice when you accept one and are walking along with a paper in hand... they will still offer you another copy of the same newspaper. In the worst case, nearest the station, two different people will sometimes offer you two copies of the same paper within a metre of each other.

Give it a rest already. I've read the paper and it was terrible. Full of useless gossip about Big-Brother and the WAGs and not a single thought-provoking article at all. They even seem to be quite proud of the sections where random people write in and offer their opinion on some random topic. Let me give you a hint: Regular columnists are good because you get to know which ones you like and can filter based on the name of the columnist. With these random people, you have to read a significant portion of the article before realising that the writer is an idiot and not worth listening to but you have to keep reading every day because you don't know if today might be the day where someone intelligent writes in.

Maybe it will get better. Maybe this is actually what people want and I'm just too fussy.